[Wolves] Clonezilla

[Andy Jewell]

Hi Peter,

If you had trouble formatting the disk again, that suggests a hardware problem to me. Maybe sector zero got spared out?

On Dave's point - yes you *can* format a 200GB disk with FAT32, you just have to use 64k clusters and waste a lot of space on the drive if you have lots of small files. I agree with Dave here - if you have to use the device on both windoze and linux, go for ntfs, otherwise if it's just for linux, go with ext3.

The main thing to bear in mind with FAT32 is the 2GB file-size limit. You can get round this using clonezilla's option to break the image up into <2GB chunks.

The main advantage of clonezilla over bog-standard DD is that it can copy only the sectors that are actually in use, meaning that if you are imaging a fresh install of a system, with only 10% of the disk in use, your backup won't contain most of the 90% of unused sectors. In addition, clonezilla can successfully restore to a disk of different geometry.

Andy D'Arcy Jewell
SysMicro Linux Support

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________________________________________
From: wolves-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk [wolves-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk] on behalf of Dave Morley [davmor2 at davmor2.co.uk]
Sent: 09 November 2010 11:21
To: Wolverhampton Linux User Group
Subject: Re: [Wolves] Clonezilla

On Tue, 2010-11-09 at 11:01 +0000, Peter Cannon wrote:
> Hi All
>
> I've never used Clonezilla and I know nothing about it.
>
> 1. Does it format the drive you wish to store the image on?
> 2. Is it OK for the storage medium (HDD) to be FAT?
> 3. Can you only 'see' the images with a Clonezilla disk?
>
> IMO the Clonzilla site is pants for explanations I downloaded it but of course it gave me the 64bit version when I needed the 32bit one, and that took some hunting down. I booted the machine I want to snapshot with the CD in the drive and the external USB 200GB HDD attached (FAT) I want to snapshot a W2K Server transfer that image to the 200GB drive then do some jiggery pokery with the images that's not important to talk about here (Yet).
>
> Clonezilla saw the 200GB external drive, as far as I am aware it imaged the W2K and copied said image to the Ext HDD however after two passes (C: & E:) the external drive was suddenly empty even of the FAT partition? I had a hell of a game formatting it again.
>
> I intend to try again this afternoon just wondering if I'm doing anything wrong or am I not understanding what it does?
>
There are some pretty good docs on the cd iirc.

As far as I know using as regularly as I do it doesn't format your hd,
but I had it formatted to EXT3 anyway.  I only use the hd for backups so
it didn't matter.

I didn't think you could format the HDD of 200 gb to be Fat are you sure
it's not ntfs which is the default now?

You might want to try either ntfs or ext3 for the fs and see if it
behaves then.

fat iirc will only partition upto 32gb or 20something can't remember
it's been a while.

--
Seek That Thy Might Know

http://www.davmor2.co.uk